Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Pabappa]

wiktionary lists Old Norse as inheriting the same root and thus leading to modern Swedish & Danish park, with different meanings because they are native words.

i guess French manche "sleeve" from Latin manica is evidence of the same sort of process, although it seems to have been unreliable, since French also has grange "granary" from Latin granica, both alons\gside other words in which the /i/ survived .... though this may be due to early inherited differences in stress, or later reborrowings of the -ic- morpheme. -c is the masculine of -che, so clerc makes sense now. it must have had initial stress proto-Gallo-Romance.

[MacAnDàil]

I noticed Wiktionary's mentioning of Danish and Swedish park and checked it up on the Swedish academy's dictionary website:https://www.saob.se/artikel/?unik=P_0211-0173.LO9K&pz=5. They say that the Old Swedish word comes from the Old Danish, itself from the Middle High German, from the Middle Dutch, from the French. Pretty crazy lengths a Germanic root went to spread among Germanic languages via a Romance one.

[Linguoboy]

wiktionary lists Old Norse as inheriting the same root and thus leading to modern Swedish & Danish park, with different meanings because they are native words.

I wonder what their sources are since the Wiktionary entries for those words gloss them both as "park", as do (respectively) the SAO and Den Danske Ordbog. (There's nothing at all about fishponds in the latter.)

[zompist]

i guess French manche "sleeve" from Latin manica is evidence of the same sort of process, although it seems to have been unreliable, since French also has grange "granary" from Latin granica, both alons\gside other words in which the /i/ survived .... though this may be due to early inherited differences in stress, or later reborrowings of the -ic- morpheme.

You can also add pertica > perche.

-c is the masculine of -che

Kind of, but more accurately, c > ch / _a, as in carrus > char and many others.

[Kuchigakatai]

i guess French manche "sleeve" from Latin manica is evidence of the same sort of process, although it seems to have been unreliable, since French also has grange "granary" from Latin granica

I think this involves an irregular, incomplete sound change where the unstressed post-tonic vowel was sometimes eliminated by syncope early enough to prevent consonant voicing, and sometimes not.

More examples with consonant voicing:
alapa > OFr. alve
excommunicāre > OFr. escomengier
carricāre > Fr. charger
fabricāre > Fr. forger
bullicāre > Fr. bouger
-āticum > Fr. -age

Examples where those consonants are kept voiceless, contrasting with the Iberian pattern of voicing them throughout:

Sp. colgar ~ Fr. coucher (< collocāre)
Sp. cabalgar ~ Fr. chevaucher (< caballicāre)
Pt. pingar ~ pencher (< pendicāre)
Sp. nalga ~ Fr. nache (< natica, also attested as nage in OFr.)
Pt. perda ~ Fr. perte (< perdita)
Sp. verdad ~ OFr. verté (< vēritātem)
OSp. beldad ~ Fr. beauté (< bellitātem)
Sp. bondad ~ Fr. bonté (< bonitātem)
OSp. lealdad ~ Fr. loyauté (< lēgālitātem)
OSp. fieldad ~ OFr. fëelté (< fīdēlitātem)
Sp. crueldad (< crūdēlitātem) ~ OFr. cruauté (< *crūdālitātem < crūdēlitātem)
Sp. mortandad ~ OFr. mortelté (< mortālitātem)
Sp. domingo ~ Fr. dimanche (the development of diēs dominicus/dominica > dimanche is the definition of "messy", but nevertheless my point is the -c- was retained in voiceless form)

[Linguoboy]

i guess French manche "sleeve" from Latin manica is evidence of the same sort of process, although it seems to have been unreliable, since French also has grange "granary" from Latin granica, both alons\gside other words in which the /i/ survived .... though this may be due to early inherited differences in stress, or later reborrowings of the -ic- morpheme.

You can also add pertica > perche.

So what's going on with porticus > porche? Analogy? It's masculine, so I don't think we can postulate a VL *portica to account for this.

[Kuchigakatai]

i guess French manche "sleeve" from Latin manica is evidence of the same sort of process, although it seems to have been unreliable, since French also has grange "granary" from Latin granica, both alons\gside other words in which the /i/ survived .... though this may be due to early inherited differences in stress, or later reborrowings of the -ic- morpheme.

You can also add pertica > perche.

So what's going on with porticus > porche? Analogy? It's masculine, so I don't think we can postulate a VL *portica to account for this.

Whatever happened would also explain -āticum > Fr. -age (as in silvāticus > sauvage, why not *sauvac?), diēs dominicus > Fr. dimanche and Cat. diumenge (why not *dimenc or *dimengue?), monachus > OOc. monge (cf. excommunicāre > OOc. escumengar, why not *monc or *mongue?).

[Vijay]

I was thinking earlier about when I said (on another thread, I'm pretty sure) something about not having problems with tone diacritics. When I was little, I completely misunderstood the tone system of Mandarin Chinese. I assumed that the third tone was rising (instead of falling-rising) and all the others were level (non-contour), with the first tone being mid (instead of high (flat)), the second being high (instead of rising), and the fourth being low (instead of falling). I don't remember when I finally figured out how wrong I was. I must have been a teenager at least. (Bear in mind that I started learning this shit when I was like four).

I still have a lot of trouble understanding tone and pitch accent at least in some languages. I don't hear most of the tone contours in Vietnamese, and pitch accent on short vowels in Serbo-Croatian sounds to me more like a jump in pitch on the next syllable, not a rising pitch on the vowel that bears the accent mark. Also I have no clue what dialect variation exists in Serbo-Croatian as far as pitch accent is concerned.

[Pabappa]

Smell and smelt are not likely cognate, even though the scientific name of the fish is derived from the word for smell in Greek:

The Osmeriformes comprise an order of ray-finned fish that includes the true or freshwater smelts and allies, such as the galaxiids and noodlefishes; they are also collectively called osmeriforms. They belong to the teleost superorder Protacanthopterygii, which also includes pike and salmon, among others. The order's name means "smelt-shaped", from Osmerus (the type genus) + the standard fish order suffix "-formes". It ultimately derives from Ancient Greek osmé (ὀσμή, "pungent smell") + Latin forma ("external form"), the former in reference to the characteristic aroma of the flesh of Osmerus.[1][2][3]

[Space60]

Many languages have had "mama" develop independently for "mother" and words with the sounds /t/, /d/, /p/, /b/ and the vowel /a/ develop independently for "father". It's often said that this is because the sounds /m/, /t/, /d/, /p/ and /b/ are easy for small children to pronounce. But if this is the only reason, shouldn't words for "father" with /m/ and "mother" with the sounds /t/, /d/, /p/ and /b/ develop about as often? Why isn't this the case? Why is /m/ usually used for "mother" and /t/, /d/, /p/ and /b/ usually used for "father"?

[Vijay]

/m/ is a sound that requires the lips to move in a way similar to a baby drinking milk.

[Linguoboy]

Also, /m/ is one of the first sounds consistently produced by children. Traditionally infants have been raised primarily by their mothers, with fathers becoming involved later in life (after the children have mastered dental/alveolar phonemes as well) if at all.

[Salmoneus]

Also, /m/ is one of the first sounds consistently produced by children. Traditionally infants have been raised primarily by their mothers, with fathers becoming involved later in life (after the children have mastered dental/alveolar phonemes as well) if at all.

Exactly. All childrearing is in most societies primarily women's work, but in particular the raising of pre-linguistic suckling infants is done by mothers. Mothers are generally held to have a closer bond with their children, and are also in a position to more closely observe early speech sounds (and attribute them, probably correctly, to themselves).

In English, we've taken the first two words a baby's likely to say - ma/mama and ba/baba - as the names for the mother and child, as they're likely to be in 'conversations' with one another long before the father joins in. Also note that after dada or papa, we get nana, who is usually a grandmother or aunt or the like - we don't have an equivalent for uncle or grandfather.

But of course this is just a tendency and isn't absolute. There are languages in which dada/tata or baba/papa is the mother and mama is the father. They're just less common.

[zompist]

In English, we've taken the first two words a baby's likely to say - ma/mama and ba/baba - as the names for the mother and child

Overall this is right, but I'd quibble at the "In English" bit. English-speaking mothers don't go through this bit of decision-making— "mama" is already part of the language, and its parent, and its parent. Wiktionary takes it back to PIE *méh₂-méh₂-. The word méh₂tēr 'mother' is the baby-talk méh₂ plus an agentive suffix. So if anyone was actually assigning meanings to baby-talk, it was someone in the Neolithic.

[Pabappa]

As an aside, I reeeeeeeally doubt that PIE-era babies were crawling around going /mex mex/ or whatever the original sound value of h₂ actually was. Sometimes people are too aggressive at getting the etymologies to fit common patterns, I think. The same applies to the supposed root /atta/ "dad(dy)", which if real would be the oooonly example in the entire language of a geminate consonant within a root.

As to whether /mama/ is a babytalk distortion of "mother", or a word all its own, I dont know .... babies start to babble before they can learn to imitate adults' speech, so any equating of /mama/ with "mother" must be coming from the parents' side. So yes, we still assign new meanings to baby talk. But then some children will continue to say /mama/ as a term of address distinct from the word "mother" or "mom" they use when talking about other kids' moms.

Can't resist sharing this comic: https://www.instagram.com/p/BzYadEbhYbV/

Only thing is that real baby talk is neither of those things...its just a pattern of sounds babies make before they learn to talk.

[Zaarin]

As an aside, I reeeeeeeally doubt that PIE-era babies were crawling around going /mex mex/ or whatever the original sound value of h₂ actually was. Sometimes people are too aggressive at getting the etymologies to fit common patterns, I think.

Marianne Mithun discusses some of the languages of the Plateau and Inland Northwest that remove complicated sounds like ejectives and dorsal fricatives from babytalk. PIE could have done the same. Then again other languages like Tlingit don't.

[zompist]

As an aside, I reeeeeeeally doubt that PIE-era babies were crawling around going /mex mex/ or whatever the original sound value of h₂ actually was. Sometimes people are too aggressive at getting the etymologies to fit common patterns, I think.

Heh. I don't know enough about PIE to say. It could certainly be argued that reconstructing something like *mex for babytalk is a sign that the word is unlikely.

As to whether /mama/ is a babytalk distortion of "mother"

FWIW I was suggesting the opposite! "Mother" is the derived form. (This isn't my speculation, but I forget who I got it from. I do recall that the paper suggested that people tend to "normalize" words like "mama" so they're things a baby can pronounce.)

[Vijay]

Is it possible that baby talk doesn't mean how babies talk but rather how adults talk to babies?

[Travis B.]

Is it possible that baby talk doesn't mean how babies talk but rather how adults talk to babies?

Naturally how babies learn language should be universal, so if the same phones are treated differently by babies learning two different languages implies that they are actually being treated differently by adults and older children when they speak to said babies in said languages.

[Vijay]

What I mean is: Is it possible that the "baby-talk méh₂" was not produced by babies at all, but rather by adults talking to their babies? "Baby talk" is a vague term, and I have seen it used before in the linguistic literature to mean not only how babies themselves talk but also how adults talk to them.

Grown-ups have a lot of funny ideas about how they should talk to babies and what sounds they can (or do) produce or understand more easily. These ideas are often wrong. In some cultures, adults have a special speech style just for talking to babies ("widdle cuddly-wuddly"), and that speech style is called "baby talk" in some studies (as well as nonlinguistic sources).